It’s quite speedy. Border-less 4×6″
photos print in 45 seconds, while 8.5×11″ prints in 3 minutes. Hardly any noise
while printing. Just a little when it grabs the paper. One thing we’ll still
have to fiddle with is calibration. The photos lack a little bit of vibrancy in
the red area, which I confirmed with a calibration sheet. Otherwise we
really like it so far. Just need to find a place to put it. It’s too big for our
(temporary) computer carts.

Note Feb 1:Turns out this
was a prank using an empty G5 Case with some spare PC parts. Made a lot of
people scratch their head though! Andy only had to wade through 1300 emails
after his photos & story were published. – LOL.

Wanting to expand our possibilities a little bit, we took
the plunge and ordered a new digital camera … and are upgrading our printer
as well.

We decided on a 5 MegaPixel Canon Powershot G5 & a
Canon i9100. The jump to a compact 6MP or an SLR model was a bit bigger than we
wanted to take, so we settled for the G5. It’s not exactly pocket size, but it
does come with the features we considered crucial in order to upgrade. (5MP,
better zoom, bit larger LCD, swivel display) We’ll probably need some extra
compact flash storage given the 2.5 MB photos, but a 256MB card will do for the
time being.

The printer has received plenty of recommendations, uses
6 individual cartridges and allows up to A3 size printing, so that’ll be sweet.

Needless to say, we can’t wait to see FedEx & UPS stop by later
in the week.
(hopefully
they’re not shipping from California!!)

Tomorrow morning we’re going back to -10F (-23C) with a
real feel of -27F (-33C). I think we’ll just stay inside ;) I cross my fingers
that the building doesn’t run out of heating oil again the way it did last
week!

You may have noticed I said there has been no snow. Well, the
weatherman said last night we only had 0.5″ this January compared to over 12″ on
average. Small difference. Maybe king winter still packs a big punch, but right
now the lack of snow is a problem for the winter sports.

Thanks to C :)We exchanged our Cubes, so I’m nowsmiling ear to ear behind the 500 MHz Geforce 2 Cube. Swapped our hard disks andplanted some extra RAM. (1GB up from 768MB). The difference is not huge, butnoticeable. It’s nice to have a bit more “headroom” . I look forwardto update OS X from Jaguar tohref=”http://www.apple.com/macosx/”>Panther to get the addedbenefits. Maybe by the weekend I’ll be Pantherized. The only thing I don’t knowis how iBlog will import the existing data. I always prefer a clean install overan upgrade (= erasing the partition) so I would need to make sure I know how torestore the blog …For the rest it’s waiting forhref=”http://www.apple.com/hardware/ads/1984/”>Anniversary of theMac. Something new is bound to come out! Rumor has it there’ll be an importantApple ad at the superbowl. No, we’re not curious! ;) Click here to read more …

I have pushed the first set of changes through iBlog.
There are still a few areas where I’m plagued with browser interpretations. -No, the times
where 4 browsers show 4 different results for whichever reason are still not
entirely behind us – On the plus side the site should be quite a bit
lighter (KB-wise) and thus faster to access for those on slower connections. I
strapped iBlog down quite a bit and look forward to doing so a bit more
:)

My only big obstacle has been my advanced site menu, which I can’t
seem to fit into it’s new space – yet. For now I’m forced to leave it
offline.

Another thing I noted is that when activetopic.com is down,
that the site will stop loading till the browser times out on activetopic.com. I
hope this won’t be a persistent problem.

10. Those who have it would be devastated if it was ever
cut off.9. Those who have it think that those who don’t are somehow
inferior. 8. Those who don’t have it may agree that it’s neat but think
it’s not worth the fuss that those who have it make about it. (read
more)

The “soap box” is the small chat column /
messageboard-like area on the right where you can leave a short message. These
are independent of my entries and their comments. Neat thing is they don’t
require a popup. (unlike the comments). The text entry fields are below the
posted messages.

Feel free to “step onto the soap box” and say
something :) No need to be shy ;) WINK
WINK

What does one do when it’s -15C outside? Stay warm &
solve computer problems. I had an “interesting” afternoon yesterday.

A) You take a working PC. Reinstall XP and the required drivers.
Insert a very long list of Windows updates … and it will crash playing an MPEG
clip. Repeatedly. (more)

B) Last October I wiped a computer,
installed Win98, updated it, installed antivirus, etc and took it off the
network. Turns out it was infected with a drive-by installed trojan
(downloader.esepor) that very same day. It had been piggy-backed onto some
(hacked?) homepage and exploited at least one MS vulnerability.